Simcoe OP: Stakeholders want a say

By Judy Baldassi Novae Res Urbis August 22 2012

Today marks the final day that Simcoe County residents can submit written comments on a modified draft official plan. County planners, not to mention land owners and developers, are eager to see the official plan approved after four years of attempting to bring it in line with the provincial growth plan. But local environment and resident groups who consider the modified draft to be a “fundamentally flawed document” say that that the county is rushing the plan through with insufficient public consultation.

Simcoe County council adopted the draft official plan in November 2008, but it failed to gain approval from the province because of conflicts with the 2006 Places to Grow Act. As a result the province introduced amendment one to offer greater clarity to Simcoe County planners. Staff has recently modified the document to comply with the amendment and the Lake Simcoe Protection Act.

“This is a totally different plan than was put forward in 2008, and we need to have public input on it; it’s as simple as that,” said AWARE Simcoe growth committee chair Sandy Agnew in an interview with NRU.

Agnew, along with others at AWARE Simcoe, Environ- mental Defense, Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, Midhurst Ratepayers Association and other local organizations have created a petition calling for an “open public consultation process” and outlining their numerous concerns with the draft document. The groups intend to submit the petition before deadline today.

But Simcoe County planning director David Parks says the department is just playing by the rules.

“We had public meetings when we passed the OP—the prescribed public meetings on the matters under appeal. We revised the document and we’re putting that out to the public for comment, and the comments are coming in now,” he said in an interview with NRU.

At last count Parks said they had received about 30 to 40 submissions, but he was unaware of the petition that is expected to be submitted.

“The documents are posted on our website—the modified draft plan and a version with track changes so the public can see what has been stroked out and put in. We believe we’re providing adequate and appropriate information at this stage of the process,” he said.

Parks said that staff will bring the modified draft to council in September along with an account of public comments. At that point, he says, it’s up to council to determine if it wants to hold additional public meetings.

“We don’t believe accepting written comments is enough. It certainly wouldn’t work if there were a new official plan starting from scratch. Because they say it’s the old official plan, they’re getting away with doing it this way… There has been a lot of change in Simcoe County in the last few years—a huge amount of development. A lot of people now probably have different views than they had in 2007 and 2008 when they were last consulted,” says AWARE Simcoe’s vice chair Katie Harries.

With increasing amounts of development in the county, the petition also cites issues with sprawl, which they worry the plan promotes. As a result, the environmental groups believe the plan fails to adequately protect forests, wetlands, farmlands and water quality. They argue that the population targets should be based on the region’s carrying capacity, not population projections.

“The authors have an alternative view of planning. Instead of looking at past trends that have had disastrous effects, we urge instead that population targets be based on the carrying capacity of the land, to ensure communities that are sustainable for the long term, and to preserve agricultural land and the environment,” it says in the petition.

But planning consultant Antony Lorius says growth forecasts are not that simple. An associate partner at Hemson Consultants Inc., Lorius isn’t working with Simcoe at the moment, but helped with some of the more technical aspects of the plan in 2008.

Growth forecasts are “not simply a continuation of past market trends. They consider a whole bunch of economic and demographic influences… There’s a whole complex analytical and consultation process that goes into preparing the forecasts, and then there are some policy influences in the growth plan as well.”

As for his role, Parks says “we’re following provincial policy. Growth plan amendment number one provides population matters that are entrenched in legislation which the county is required to put in its official plan.”

Midhurst Ratepayers Association secretary David Strachan said, “the fact that the official plan has been rewritten to comply with the province’s amendment one doesn’t make it right. The Ontario government was irresponsible to favour the interest of developers and the political aspirations of lower-tier politicians over sound planning principles.”

Strachan’s community of Midhurst is set to grow 10-fold under changes made to the growth plan.

Lorius holds the opinion that provincial legislation is doing a good job protecting Simcoe against what could be an enormous amount of growth.

“I think that there is a fair bit more development pressure in Simcoe County than is envisioned in the growth plan. So it really is capping it. The growth plan is allowing much less development than we’d probably see if we let the market dictate. Some of the targets in the growth plan are going to mean a much different pattern of development than we’ve seen in the past. It’s going to be much denser, much more compact, use less land than it otherwise would have. So in many respects the growth plan is reining it in in Simcoe County.”